Pushing buttons: an ethnographic interview study on toxicity in online gaming cultures

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to research toxicity through how it was understood, experienced, and described by game enthusiasts. The toxicity described is further explored through theories of cultural and symbolic domination and through feminist game studies and the lens of masculinity theory. I have thus looked at the cultural fields of online gaming as social domains sometimes structured by hierarchies, where subjects may be positioned in relation to one another by virtue of norms, their identities, habitus, symbolic capital and through (more or less symbolic) violence.  The study is based on semi-structured interviews with six gaming enthusiasts who are about twenty to forty years old, five identifying as men and one identifying as a woman. Interpretation has been conducted through a thematic and discourse analytically inspired method, and through the theoretical framework primarily consisting of Bourdieu´s (developed) theoretical concepts of fields, capital, habitus and symbolic violence, combined with Iris Marion Young’s theory of cultural dominance and social constructionist theories on masculinity. The study shows how subjects may make sense of online gaming as a social arena often associated to online violence and discrimination, and how this can be further analysed from a gender studies perspective.